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Saturday, April 23, 2011

Our fielding was just spectacular: Sachin

Mumbai: Mumbai Indians continued their unflinching performance to eke out an eight-run win over Chennai Super Kings, here, on Friday. Speaking at the post-match presentation ceremony, Mumbai skipper Sachin Tendulkar attributed the team’s victory to their brilliant fielding and catching.

The following are excerpts

Sachin Tendulkar: I think the fielding was unbelievable. The boys took some brilliant catches and the ground fielding was also superb. We saved a lot of runs and that’s what created pressure. Maybe, we were 10 or 15 runs short after we finished at 164… But I was talking to Rohit (Sharma), who batted brilliantly, and he said that 160 odd runs is a defendable total if we field well and hold on to our catches… Malinga’s second spell was crucial. The plan was to bowl a bouncer… It was conveyed to him and to win this game we had to get Mike Hussey out. If he had batted till the end then possibly the result would have been different. We had to go for wickets and Malinga and Pollard’s combination was brilliant.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: I think 164 was very much gettable because the wicket was really nice. Fielding was the only difference I think between the two sides. They took two catches that really mattered and we backed out of two catches that bailed them out. Happy with our performance, but fielding could have been just a little better. The last few overs were really well that helped us restrict Mumbai to 164. We were short of two bowlers. So, it became tough to manage because we didn’t have too many part-timers today.

Harbhajan Singh (Man of the Match): I am glad that things worked out today. I think, overall, we played very good cricket and we fielded brilliantly. That was the best thing about our game. On the whole, we played better cricket than Chennai and we deserve to win. Chennai is a very strong side in this competition and we all know that. Taking Suresh Raina’s wicket early on was important and after that we focused on getting the net run rate up.